Film

Spoilers ahead! Read at your own risk. In the very last moment of Django Unchained Hildy grabs a rifle.** The movie follows her husband, Django (Jamie Foxx), on his quest to save her. Saved, Hildy (Kerry Washington) must learn to save herself, and/or her husband. But we have to imagine that future, because Django is a movie about [...]

January 3, 2013Aymar Jean ChristianTelevision and FilmComments Off on Vengeance Is Boring And Better On TV

Ask anyone in the indie web video market about their biggest problem, and you’ll get a bunch of different answers: subpar production quality, too many shows, not enough viewers, etc. But the biggest issue facing web video is pretty simple: not enough buyers and not enough money. Sure, YouTube has pumped tens of millions into [...]

December 6, 2012Aymar Jean ChristianVideoComments Off on How Much Video Can We Buy? Chill.com and Direct-to-Consumer Marketing

At one point in José Padilha’s Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, a police officer confronts local gang members in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, asking for his share of their drug revenue. The police are corrupt, but their illicit money supply has been cut off by their own belligerence: a massacre at a prison temporarily [...]

April 1, 2012Aymar Jean ChristianFeaturesComments Off on Cinematic Rage: Glorious Defiance In Contemporary Political Dramas

Originally posted at Splice Today. Indie film tends toward realism. It’s not hard to understand why: on a low-budget, the special effects necessary for fantasy and science fiction are hard to achieve. Creative filmmakers aren’t afraid of a challenge, though. In recent years, and especially 2011, a handful of art house movies ventured into the [...]

January 17, 2012Aymar Jean ChristianTelevision and FilmComments Off on In Search of Indie Cosmic

In yet another great exclusive report on the industry, New York‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner writes today that Fox has been having a bit of trouble starting production on two possible sequels to Independence Day, in part because Will Smith is not yet signed on to star. Money problems. Smith, who’s been absent for years but is coming [...]

Thanks to the Boston Phoenix for linking! I’d been planning a post on Attack the Block, the brilliant UK sci-fi film, and Misfits, e4’s hit teen series, before I read about parts of London spuriously rioting in response to the police killing of Mark Duggan. When I read the youth of London were enraged, seemingly [...]

UPDATE: Pixar’s Brave seems to be following in this tradition. Talk to any feminist over the age of, say, 40 or 50, and you’re likely to hear a sigh of resignation at the state of women in Hollywood, in front and behind the camera. Young women today just care about Sex and the City, he [...]

Posted at Splice Today In his magnificent essay on Avatar in The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn contrasts Avatar with The Wizard of Oz, another vibrant fantasy about travelling to exotic places. Using the end of Oz — the return to Kansas — as counterpoint to the end of Avatar — staying in Pandora [...]

April 6, 2011Aymar Jean ChristianuncategorizedComments Off on From ‘Avatar’ to ‘Source Code,’ Living in a Fantasy

Full post at Splice Today You have a problem. You’ve got a good script in your hands, adapted from a story by Philip K. Dick. It’s interesting and sophisticated. It’s a romance and a thriller. It’s science fiction and fantasy. It has Christian overtones for Middle America and a New York setting for the urbanites. [...]

TV has never been bigger, but individual programs? Not so much. Yes, the latest Super Bowl was the most watched telecast ever, but the success of the program only underscored how hard it has been for series to grab the huge audiences they used to twenty and thirty years ago. Jennifer Beals’ The Chicago Code, [...]